Los Angeles–area cultural institution the Huntington, which encompasses an art museum, library, and botanical garden, has announced this year’s gifts to its art collection funded by the Huntington’s Art Collectors’ Council. Each year, the council chooses works to acquire based on recommendations from the museum’s curators.
The five Art Collectors’ Council acquisitions span the 16th to the 21st centuries and encompass a range of media. The gifts build on the museum’s existing holdings while creating connections with its library and garden.
The earliest of these gifts is a 16th-century majolica plate made in Deruta, Italy, a leading center of majolica ceramics since the Renaissance. One of only 10 known Deruta dishes bearing verses by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, it complements the library’s rare editions of the poet’s works.
Also included in the group is a hanging scroll painted by the Chinese painter Zhang Chenglong at the turn of the 17th century. This nearly 10-foot-long work depicts Mount Tai, one of China’s Five Sacred Mountains, and leads the viewer’s eye along the pilgrimage routes to the mountain’s summit. Traditional landscape paintings such as this one inspired the Huntington’s own Chinese Garden, and the scroll will be the centerpiece of planned exhibition of Chinese garden paintings in 2029.
Created around 1620, a still life by Jan Breughel the Elder—son of Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Breughel the Elder—is the first European floral still life to enter the Huntington’s collection. Featuring a circlet of flowers along with a collection of imported luxuries such as a string of pearls and a Japanese lacquer box, it has a clear connection to the institution’s famed botanical garden.
Also new to the collection is a 1933 copper and gilt sculpture by California modernist artist Sargent Claude Johnson. Drawing on West African traditional masks, it is one of Johnson’s many works celebrating Black American life and beauty. It will join two pieces by Johnson already in the Huntington’s collection, as well as other works of the Harlem Renaissance by Charles White, Romare Bearden, and others. Johnson was the subject of an exhibition at the Huntington in 2024.
The fifth work, Raqib Shaw’s Space Between Dreams – The Pragmatic Pessimist (2022–23), depicts the Kashmiri British artist in a vast frozen landscape, burning books for warmth. Drawing in part on Mughal miniature painting, work was also inspired by the Huntington’s collection of 18th-century Beauvais tapestries. The gift reunites it with its companion work, Space Between Dreams –The Perseverant Prophet, acquired by the Huntington in 2025.
In addition to works acquired through the Art Collectors’ Council, the Huntington has received several important gifts in 2026, among them a version of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE sculpture, a group of watercolors by American modernists such as Joseph Stella and John Marin, and a pair of photograms by Abstract Expressionist artist Theodore Roszak.